Ferrofish

German advanced audio applications developer Ferrofish was founded in 2011 by Jürgen Kindermann, formerly a hardware engineer with Creamware, and, latterly, the Managing Director of Sonic Core, who bought the former’s intellectual property when that company folded. Ferrofish had allowed its founder to revisit and build upon some core Creamware technologies — no pun intended!
As such, the A16 MkII is an analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue convertor. Two rear-panel mounted ADAT inputs and outputs provide a full 16 channels of ADAT I/O. It also has optical MADI I/O, synchronisation via Wordclock BNC, and MIDI In, Out, and Thru for control purposes. The digital I/O is converted via the 16 balanced TRS input and outputs. But the I/O is just the start of this ingenious 1U box of tricks. The front panel includes two high-resolution TFT screens that display a number of features that make the A16 MkII a very versatile 192kHz-capable convertor. Users could, for example, convert ADAT to analogue and then the analogue back to MADI. Remote software setup is available and up to four units can be stacked together to provide an impressive 64 analogue inputs and outputs — useful in the studio and also as a comprehensive solution for live recording as the convertors could be located onstage with up to two kilometres of MADI optical cable running back to the MADI-equipped mixing console or DAW!
Ferrofish also caters to musicians with its authentic-sounding B4000+ organ emulation module with real drawbars, high-end endless potentiometers, and a TFT display, plus pure processing power courtesy of Analog Devices Sharc DSP — once bitten, forever smitten!